Captain Georgina Sutton vividly remembers the day, nearly 25 years ago, when she received a life-changing phone call from
Qantas Airways
, where she had lodged an application to be a pilot. She was in Port Augusta, South Australia where she was piloting a Cessna 421 for a small regional airline, and the flight was delayed.

“It was pre-mobile phones, and I got a message to ring Qantas," Sutton says. “I remember I came out and said [to the passengers afterward], ‘We are still delayed, but I’ve got a job with Qantas on the 747-400s’, which hadn’t been introduced at that stage. It was a very exciting time."

She was hired in May 1989 to become a Sydney-based second officer on the jumbo jet, just five years after Qantas hired its first female pilot and a decade after Ansett hired
Deborah Lawrie
as the first female pilot for a major Australian airline in 1979.

Nearly 25 years later, Sutton, a ­52-year-old keen water skier, has been promoted to the role of Qantas’s 767 fleet captain. She oversees about 180 pilots, only 13 of whom are women.

It is the highest position a female pilot has ever achieved at a major ­Australian airline.

Her promotion comes at a time when the direct reports to the chief executives at Qantas and
Virgin Australia Holdings
are 37.5 per cent and 50 per cent female respectively.

Women pilots are ‘thrilled’

But 35 years after Lawrie, now a ­Tigerair Australia line training captain, joined Ansett, piloting remains a ­stubbornly male-dominated field in Australia and the rest of the world.

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“I think the women pilots within Qantas are thrilled that I’ve been appointed to this role," Sutton says.

“I think it is also a very positive ­position for me to be in to act as a role model for them. It is something they can aspire to."

Qantas has 3784 pilots, of which only 4.5 per cent are female. At Virgin, 4.9 per cent of the 1599 pilots are women and at Tigerair women account for 7.7 per cent of the 155 pilots.

The figures at some individual ­divisions are higher. At regional carrier QantasLink, where many younger pilots go to get their foot in the door with the airline, 9.3 per cent are female and Virgin’s recent group of cadet pilots was 50 per cent female.

But compared with the number of women in flight attendant, other customer service and commercial roles within the airline industry, very few are sitting in the cockpit.The situation is similar in the United States, where as of 2010 data, only 6.6 per cent of commercial pilot licences and 3.9 per cent of airline transport licences needed to command a commercial aircraft were held by women.

Encourage more women

Groups such as Aviation/Aerospace and the Australian Women Pilots’ Association (AWPA) are trying to encourage more young women to consider aviation as a career option.

Sutton, who has spoken to school career nights and the Scout Flying Club to encourage aviation careers, says she knew she was interested in aviation at a young age, despite a lack of any family members in the profession.

She started by building model aircraft and hanging them from her four-poster bed as a young girl.

After a glider flight at age 16 in her hometown of Adelaide, she was hooked. “I just completely fell in love with soaring above the Murray River with pelicans and eagles, without the sound of a motor – it was fantastic."

“Women are more than capable of standing on their own two feet, setting goals and achieving them, in this case achieving the various licences and endorsements and ratings as pilots," Ms Graham says. “But as women I believe they are more open to utilising any opportunities available such as networking with their peers, but this is on an individual basis."

Sutton earned a glider licence and eventually a power licence as part of the Scout Flying Club and joined the South Australian Police to fund her com­mercial pilot’s licence.

She says the experience in the police force, in another non-traditional role for a woman at the time, assisted her once she joined Qantas after spending a few years working with smaller airlines in regional areas such as Port Augusta.

At Qantas, one of the early highlights in her career was flying the Queen from London to Singapore in 1992, when she was a first officer on the 747-400, alongside one of her mentors at the airline.

‘We’re flying the Queen of England’

“He was terrific to fly with and I’ll never forget him saying, ‘We’re flying the Queen of England, but we don’t fly the aeroplane any differently, because we’ll fly to our standard operating procedures’," she recalls.

“And he was absolutely right because the standard operating procedures are the backbone of any flying operation that pilots adhere to."

As the Sydney-based 767 fleet captain, Sutton is responsible for making sure those procedures are followed as she oversees 13 767 aircraft and associated personnel, serving as a liaison between the pilots and senior management. About one-third of her time is now spent flying; the other two-thirds on management.

“I make a point of trying to meet with the pilots when we change over," she says. “For example [on Tuesday] I went flying and we did three sectors and I counted that I interacted with 10 767 pilots in that one day.

“So that is part of flying: the opportunities to interact with the crew."

Qantas plans to retire its fleet of ­ageing 767s by 2016, replacing them with A330s transferred from Jetstar as the budget carrier receives its new 787s. Sutton is helping manage the transition of pilots to new types of ­aircraft and hasn’t decided about what her next role within the group could be, nor whether it will involve more or less flying than the one-third roster she operates at the moment.

“I sometimes go into the simulator," she says. “I probably enjoy my flying even more [now that I do it less].

“I love going flying – it is really ­enjoyable. But I also enjoy the new role of the fleet captain."